HOME | DD
chasmosaur — Spock's Head Explodes
Published: 2010-02-26 11:36:54 +0000 UTC; Views: 4319; Favourites: 62; Downloads: 72
Redirect to original
Description
LOOKIT ME DRAWIN' STAR TREK COMICS; I AM THE PRESIDENT OF THE LOSER CLUBI mean um
Oh the pain of being a walking contradiction
(P.S. I don't really want Leonard Nimoy's head to explode he is a pretty cool guy)
Related content
Comments: 44
But if his head is eplodededed what would be the point of kidnapping him?
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
From looking at the wide array of life that you can find pretty much any where on this planet, it wouldn't surprise me if the next intelligent species we meet are large, gelatinous amoebas. Basic biologic evolution states that creatures must develop a way to manipulate their environment, (hands, tentacles, etc.), a way of locomotion (again tentacles, legs, fins, etc.) and a way to extract nutrients (a mouth, extremely porous skin, etc.). As long as we accept these guidelines, life on other planets may in fact look and/or behave in much the same way they do on Earth. Although I tend to agree with Chasmosaur; it is very unusual that we would evolve the way we did considering that we're the only animal on this planet that walks on two legs in the manner that we do. What's weirder is that Ardipethicus ramius (our now newly declared ancestor which has all but ruled out the possibility of us being related to chimpanzees due to some fundamental anatomical differences mostly) walked upright some 4 million years ago. Scientists postulate that the reason for this was so that the creatures could free up the use of their hands for gathering food and making tools. Females would end up choosing males that were the best at these abilities, thus reinforcing our evolutionary ability to walk. Not sure if I buy it but I can't think of a much better reason.
P.S. Your comic made me lol. XD
👍: 0 ⏩: 2
Actually, Ardi is a potential ancestor of lemurs. It really has less to do with anthropoid (monkey and ape) evolution than the media would lead you to believe. Any anthropologist would point this out. However claiming we "evolved from chimpanzees" is erroneous as well. Chimpanzees are as modern a species as us, but we derived from a common ancestor many millions of years ago, slightly later than our common ancestor with gorillas, and even later than our common ancestor with orangutans. But if you had the ability to somehow rewind time and look at every human ancestor, you wouldn't find a person changing into a chimpanzee.
It's kind of like how you and your cousin share a grandparent, but you didn't come from your cousin (hence why a family tree and an evolutionary tree parallel one another). It's a mistaken impression of Natural Selection that confuses modern evolutionary biology with Lamarkian biology. This is where that whole step-ladder of evolution idea came from and the colloquial thought that evolution results in progress rather than the reality, which is just that organisms die out if they don't fit in well enough in their circumstances (not even "survival of the fittest", more like "survival of the good enough").
👍: 0 ⏩: 3
A potential ancestor of lemurs? Were did you get that? Everything I've read suggested that Ardepithecus was an ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees, or else pretty close to the branching off point.
Also, how could Ardepithecus be an ancestor of lemurs? Lemurs are fairly primitive primates with long tails and faces, while Ardepithecus was definitely an ape, with a chimpanzee-like face and no tail. Could you please explain how Ardepithecus could possibly be an ancestor of lemurs?
👍: 0 ⏩: 2
i think i made a post after this reply correcting the mistake, if you look down
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Oops, sorry, I just saw that you had been confused.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
No, no! Ardi (Ardipithecus) is still very much a human ancestor, it is Ida (Darwinius) that they got things wrong with, but that was because of all the media hype that was generated about it. If anybody else was studying that fossil, they would have said it was the ancestor of a group of extinct *lemur-like* primates (not even lemurs), Darwinius-like primates as ancestors of anthropoids was actually ruled out decades ago.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Ah, my bad. I'm trying to recall all the info from m anthropology class and some wires must've gotten crossed.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Very interesting and pretty much goes along with what I've been reading up on recently.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
That being said, while I enjoy some technical things about Star Trek, I never did like the fact that all the species they meet are bipedal and humanoid. It just didn't make sense to me. (And I was extremely disappointed that they stuck with this even for the MMORPG that was recently released) But the reasons for it are pretty self-explanatory, I think: aesthetics and budget.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Aren't Vulcans supposed to be evolved from feline-lizard-like creatures? And yet they look humanoid!
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Actually, *straightens bow tie and glasses* considering all Earth's evolution -did- happen, because of circumstances which could exist on other planets (existence of water, plants, weather, etc), it's not [i]that[/i] illogical. Life on other planets, given they had the ability to support life, could very well cause their species to evolve at least somewhat similar to how our planet did it. Simply because, well, they're both similar planets. Of course this is assuming whatever life spawns on this other planet goes by the same rules as the life we know (needing oxygen/carbon, sunlight, etc).
And as far as humanoids go, the most recent theory (that i know of) on how early ape-y humans evolved to walk upright was because it saved a few calories/energy per year. To think some other kind of 4 legged waddling species wouldn't also happen to find that useful is not that inconceivable.
👍: 0 ⏩: 2
Sorry, don't buy it. If the humanoid body plan was a great design, and not the weird result of a tailless brachiating primate attempting to be a striding biped, it would have evolved more than once, and some non-sapient animals might by running around with it. And it wouldn't result in all kinds of funky back problems. Instead, the closest thing to humanoid animals we get are penguins, swimming animals which are only on land in the first place because of the constraints of their reproductive systems.
Even if standing upright on two legs with no counterbalancing tail was a good idea, in order to get aliens that look like humans with prosthetics on, you'd have to almost exactly replay the appearance of bilateral animals, chordates, fishes, tetrapods, amniotes, mammals, primates, apes, and homonids and considering that all those things only happened once on Earth, it just isn't going to happen on some completely different world without some kind of divine intervention.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
You could argue though that because the humanoid body is a technically "bad" design, that is one of the reasons we became sapient..? Otherwise the design may not have succeeded. Species have to have a reason to become sapient, just as they have to have a reason to evolve anything.
I also wasn't saying that it's entirely possible to make an alien race that looks exactly human except with pointy ears or a crested forehead x) Mainly just saying I dont' think it's entirely impossible that the universe could produce some other kind of bipedal sapient alien with a symmetrical body, a head at the top of the body as opposed to somewhere in the middle or like, on the ground, some kind of sight recepticals in the same general area as whatever they intake food with, and something with no more limbs than is practical.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Idunno, I think it's more likely that our sapience was simply what let our weird-ass, defenseless, slow-running bodies continue to exist - an incredibly adaptive feature attached by accident to a body that is kind of crap when taken out of the trees. So maybe sapience could be attached to all sorts of wonky body designs.
But yeah while it's not entirely impossible that a really really vaguely human-shaped alien might evolve (even the Grays are still really pushing it), I'm just saying that while I like watching Vulcans and Klingons on teevee they don't make a lot of sense.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
oh and also
I lol'd xD. i love how you draw big nosed guy's thinking seriously..
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
I've thought about it some before, but I don't seeing it completely unreasonable. I mean, if you consider that most of the life supporting planets in Star Trek are generally Earth like, it doesn't seem ridiculous that evolution would follow similar directions. not as closely as the aliens in Star Trek, for sure, but still, the general idea of upright, bipedal, bilateral symmetry,
It kinda depends on your idea of evolution, whether it tends to spiral off in a random direction (resulting in Starfish Aliens (see TV tropes)) or if it has a probabilistic direction that is likely to repeat in similar pattern if you were to create a set of petri dish planets with parameters similar to Earth.
But naturally, it's pretty much impossible to determine between the two when in reality we only have a sample size of one as example.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Please see my response to makani. Evolution isn't a computer program where you stick in environmental parameters and get a consistent set of results*. It's various lineages of messy, insanely complex organic chemical systems trying to make the best of surviving and adapting via picking and choosing from bazillions of random mutations over thousand of generations.
*Similar habitats can result in convergent evolution, but a dolphin hardly looks like an ichthyosaur with a prosthetic on, nor do either of them look like ridgey-foreheaded fish. Humans obviously do not have one of those basic shapes that evolve again and again - otherwise we'd be dealing with werewolves and black lagoon creatures in real life.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Comparisons between species are relative. I don't mean nearly as close as they portray humans and the rubber forehead aliens on tv, but upright bipedal bilateral symmetry with a head on top and recognizable systems of internal organs is a biology we would recognize as a living organism and be able to analyze by the kind of biological terms we have for life on earth.
And I'm definitely not saying that the humanoid shape empirically any more special than any other known biological form. At best, I just want to say that I don't think it's empirically any less special than any form, so I think that finding aliens of a primate like shape is no more or less likely than finding aliens of similar shape to any other known form.
Anyway, it's certainly not my field or anything. I just don't think I'd be surprised to hear that, if we'd discovered a planet with a full biological ecosystem, it would have some form of primate like or humanoid life form among it's various species.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Haha, I get that way whenever I see games/movies/tv shows with humanoid aliens.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
I think I heard somewhere that Vulcans evolved from cats.....which makes less sense.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Haha, my thoughts exactly when watching Star Trek XD
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
It's Star Trek, they can make up and do whatever they want because THEY ARE STAR TREK!!!
....Or we could just vivisect Spock (evil grin)
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
In Star Trek I believe they explained this by claiming that some ancient aliens seeded a bunch of planets with humanoid species. Or something along those lines. I don't really remember.
Stupid cop-out explanation anyway, though I guess it's more than we get from a lot of similar shows/books/movies/whatever.
👍: 0 ⏩: 2
Yeah I will give them credit for at least eventually trying to explain it.
Still, if there was some PRIME DIRECTIVE (lol) in Earthly DNA to attain a humanoid shape, you'd think more animals would be trying it out instead of happily dashing about in the forms of antelope and tigers and rheas and perentie.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
That's what I remember.
But I also remember that awful episode of next gen. where the crew of the Enterprise starts "devolving" to earlier forms, and Mr. Worf turns into some kind of crustacean, suggesting that Klingons (with their redundant spines!) are not descended from the same "seeds" as the rest of the humanoid crew.
Even if Spot (Data's cat) turns into a modern iguana, we can still accept that it's a "TV stand-in" for some proto-mammal ancestor ("I'm not a therapsid, but I play one on TV"), but then Mr. Barkly screws the whole thing up by turns into a spider, which throws any sort of evolutionary consistency out the window.
Serious business, people!
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
God, obviously YOUR logic is flawed because Spock is half-human AND THEREFORE IT MAGICALLY MAKES TOTAL SENSE.
There are many things that take me out of "the moment" when I am watching SciFi shows. I always get angry when a species is portrayed to have different colored blood yet still has nice ruby lips. Or a human non-earth species having all the races and lingual accents of earth despite not evolving on an earth-like planet at all.
Maybe this is why I have a problem watching Battlestar Galactica despite all the people who tell me it's amazing. I can't get over "If they've never been to earth what are the chances that their culture just coincidentally evolved to where men wear neckties?"
Oops long comment is long.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Believability.
Just like Ak-47's showing up in a distant galaxy in stargate(or BSG for that matter)
More symbolic than trying to realistically representing the creativity of another civilization.
Personally I think it's cheap and lazy.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I can understand something like "Galactic BASIC sounds like English because it's been translated for the benefit of the audience" or some other handwave-y thing like that, but putting a '50s styled diner in the middle of a universe that didn't have the '50s is just too much for my suspension of disbelief.
Maybe that is why I get a little too excited when I see time and effort put into complex world building that considers these sorts of things.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
But without humanoid aliens, what would happen to romance in scifi?!
We might not have tits n' ass to make audience understand the beauty of the species and the hero might have to just love their alien chick because of their personality D:
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Vulcans would be more awesome if they evolved from DOLPHINS.
I'll shut up now.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Dolphins don't have to evolve on another planet either.
👍: 0 ⏩: 2
At least something vaguely dolphin-shaped is a little more likely to evolve than something vaguely human-shaped. I mean considering the whole fishy streamlined dorsal-finned thing has happened more than once, even if only among vertebrates.
FFFFFFFFF done ranting.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Yes, but then it won't be an alien Ecco the dolphin-oid, it will be an alien marine creature-oid.
By the way, the myth of the "benevolent dolphin alien noble savage messiah" dies hard. Real-life dolphins wantonly engage in murder, rape, theft, etc... If they were intelligent, they'd be no less evil than us primates.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
But they'd do it with a sweet smile.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Don't ruin my dream. ;~;
👍: 0 ⏩: 0